:)

As I get older I find myself valuing and seeing things differently. In the last week I found myself no longer nervous or anxious to the idea of going over seas. Studying\traveling abroad is something I have always wanted to do. I am fascinated with culture, and experience. It is through the experience of new things that we live and that the fire in our hearts ignites in the brightest shades.

Ever since I have switched majors, I feel good. Life is wonderful. I see myself as a leader. I know what I am doing and what I have control of, and I am comfortable with the things I do not have control of. Mechanical Engineering consumed alot of me. I was in the major with friends. This held me back. Sometimes it is good to break from the pack where things are comfortable. My friends in a way were drowning me.

Older people say this all the time, but it's something you don't understand until you have the experience, the feelings, and the emotions to describe it. It's an abstraction that cannot be shown to another person who has not experienced it. There are words...."abstraction"....they carry a great value to me now. In prior parts of life there are words that were vague...words that did not carry weight or meaning in the same way they do now.

We convey conscious meaning with words. What these words mean to me are for the most part, from what I can perceive, the same words with the same meaning for you. However, as I get older I increasingly find there are some words....they do not mean the same for you as they do for me. They have attached to them a concept that is a greater abstraction than can be conveyed purely by other words or communication. It can be an experience, a feeling, an emotion or something the cannot be categorized. To a strict realist this may sound like subjective blasphemy, but alas it is a real as anything else for me.

I have had low spots over the last few years. Times when I felt like my brain and my soul were being slowly suffocated. I have had many internal battles in regard to religion, beliefs, ideas, and a foe much more powerful and greater than any of these. This foe, my nemesis, is myself. My doubts, my emotions, my feelings, my fights with my self. For the longest time...I just could not understand....

I will do my best to convey this, but as it something very internal to me it will be hard to properly convey the proper depth in these shallow words. The war going on in my head is something I have observed for a long time. This war is between my feelings, emotions, and what I will call me. When I say "me" I am referring to my soul, my consciousness, my current experience. Me as I am right now without the physical interactions of the world directly controlling me. I am strongly convinced emotions and feelings are physical factors we must all face. The simple fact that a simple thing like drugs can toy with emotions convinces me this is so.
I know what I want to do. I know what I must do to succeed. I know what I have to do to get anything I want. I know these things in the sense of the actions I must take to make things happen. However, this ranty writing as you already know is not without a counter force. While I know what I must do, all the time in my mind there is a force that exerts a very powerful motivation. Sometimes this motivation co aligns with what I want to do. Other times it does what it can to convince me to do things that destroy the means that I desire to create the ends I desire.

It's a common foe. It is the same foe that keeps the alcoholic coming back for one more drink. It's the same foe that keeps you from going to the gym daily. It's the same foe that makes you eat just one more chunk of goodness of that junk food. It's this foe that I have fought the past 3 years.

It will be my day of true enlightenment when my soul has complete freedom from direct influence of emotion. When I can make a decision and keep it. Set a goal and complete it. It should matter not what the goal or decision is.

It's an interesting thing I am experiencing right now. I am happy, ambitious and excited. I am doing what I like right now. Ahead of me is only adventure, and it is adventure that I embrace with open arms because to be blunt it looks fun. I don't have mastery over myself, however what my feelings, and emotions want are aligned well enough with what I really wish to do that things are going well.

Jan 9, 2010